Word: braining
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...sense without first touching on the academic thunderbolt of 1977, when a paper by two Harvard neurophysiologists, Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley, ran in the American Journal of Psychiatry. At the time, Sigmund Freud's theory of dreams (which holds, in part, that dreams preserve sleep by distracting the brain with reflections of the unconscious) was a pillar of psychiatry. In The Brain as a Dream State Generator: An Activation-Synthesis Hypothesis of the Dream Process, the Harvard pair challenged Freudian theory on virtually every point. They argued that dreams are nonsense created when the forebrain makes "the best...
...school of psychology, psychiatry and psychological medicine at Melbourne's Monash University. Instead, dream researchers rely on what he calls the "faulty methodology" of waking subjects and asking them what was going on in their heads immediately before they were woken. But because certain parts of the brain are switched off during sleep, it shouldn't be assumed that subjects' answers will be accurate. They may have been having a dream but simply weren't paying attention, can't remember it, or both. "If you took a lot of the dream research to a physicist," says Conduit, "they'd laugh...
...Before delving into the latest theories, then, it's worth reviewing what we know about dreaming and the sleep state in which we seem to do most of it. REM follows four stages of sleep known collectively as non-REM sleep, in which brain activity becomes progressively more subdued. In REM-which occurs four or five times a night and lasts about 30 minutes at a time-our muscles become paralyzed, which could be a mechanism for preventing the acting out of our dreams. About half of a baby's sleep is REM compared to a quarter of an adult...
...Later, the English molecular biologist Francis Crick, a co-discoverer in the 1950s of the structure of the DNA molecule, drained a little more romance from dreaming. His and theoretical biologist Graeme Mitchison's "reverse learning" theory held that dreams rid the brain of superfluous notions, and that without this regular flushing brain overload would manifest as hallucinations and obsessions. There are echoes of this idea in the perspective of Drew Dawson, director of the University of South Australia's Centre for Sleep Research: "I tend to think of dreaming as a bit like backwashing the swimming pool filter...
...While hugely influential, Hobson and McCarley's Activation-Synthesis model attracted hordes of critics, who protested that many dreams aren't merely cognitive fragments nor a succession of chaotic images, but so story-like, sequential and dramatic that the thinking brain must surely have played a more substantial role in their production than the last-minute editing of a pile of neural bloopers. And there's the matter of lucid dreaming, in which people become aware in the course of a dream that they are, in fact, dreaming, and are able to control the course of events-a phenomenon that...